The conditions that have made for decades of peace in the
West are fast disappearing, as Europe prepares to return to the multi-polar
system that, between 1648 and 1945, bred one destructive conflict after
another

by John J. Mearsheimer

Peace: it's wonderful. I like it as much as the next man, and have no wish to
be willfully gloomy at a moment when optimism about the future shape of the
world abounds. Nevertheless my thesis in this essay is that we are likely soon
to regret the passing of the Cold War.

To be sure, no one will miss such by-products of the Cold War as the Korean and
Vietnam conflicts. No one will want to replay the U-2 affair, the Cuban missile
crisis, or the building of the Berlin Wall. And no one will want to revisit the
domestic Cold War, with its purges and loyalty oaths, its xenophobia and
stifling of dissent. We will not wake up one day to discover fresh wisdom in
the collected fulminations of John Foster Dulles.

We may, however, wake up one day lamenting the loss of the order that the Cold
War gave to the anarchy of international relations. For untamed anarchy is what
Europe knew in the forty-five years of this century before the Cold War, and
untamed anarchy--Hobbes's war of all against all--is a prime cause of armed
conflict. Those who think that armed conflicts among the European states are
now out of the question, that the two world wars burned all the war out of
Europe, are projecting unwarranted optimism onto the future. The theories of
peace that implicitly undergird this optimism are notably shallow constructs.
They stand up to neither logical nor historical analysis. You would not want to
bet the farm on their prophetic accuracy.

The world is about to conduct a vast test of the theories of war and peace put
forward by social scientists, who never dreamed that their ideas would be
tested by the world-historic events announced almost daily in newspaper
headlines. This social scientist is willing to put his theoretical cards on the
table as he ventures predictions about the future of Europe. In the process, I
hope to put alternative theories of war and peace under as much intellectual
pressure as I can muster. My argument is that the prospect of major crises,
even wars, in Europe is likely to increase dramatically now that the Cold War
is receding into history. The next forty-five years in Europe are not likely to
be so violent as the forty-five years before the Cold War, but they are likely
to be substantially more violent than the past forty-five years, the era that
we may someday look back upon not as the Cold War but as the Long Peace, in
John Lewis Gaddis's phrase.

This pessimistic conclusion rests on the general argument that the distribution
and character of military power among states are the root causes of war and
peace. Specifically, the peace in Europe since 1945--precarious at first, but
increasingly robust over time--has flowed from three factors: the bipolar
distribution of military power on the Continent; the rough military equality
between the polar powers, the United States and the Soviet Union; and the
ritualistically deplored fact that each of these superpowers is armed with a
large nuclear arsenal.

We don't yet know the entire shape of the new Europe. But we do know some
things. We know, for example, that the new Europe will involve a return to the
multipolar distribution of power that characterized the European state system
from its founding, with the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, until 1945. We know
that this multipolar European state system was plagued by war from first to
last. We know that from 1900 to 1945 some 50 million Europeans were killed in
wars that were caused in great part by the instability of this state system. We
also know that since 1945 only some 15,000 Europeans have been killed in wars:
roughly 10,000 Hungarians and Russians, in what we might call the
Russo-Hungarian War of October and November, 1956, and somewhere between 1,500
and 5,000 Greeks and Turks, in the July and August, 1974, war on Cyprus.

The point is clear: Europe is reverting to a state system that created powerful
incentives for aggression in the past. If you believe (as the Realist school of
international-relations theory, to which I belong, believes) that the prospects
for international peace are not markedly influenced by the domestic political
character of states--that it is the character of the state system, not the
character of the individual units composing it, that drives states toward
war--then it is difficult to share in the widespread elation of the moment
about the future of Europe. Last year was repeatedly compared to 1789, the year
the French Revolution began, as the Year of Freedom, and so it was. Forgotten
in the general exaltation was that the hope-filled events of 1789 signaled the
start of an era of war and conquest.

A "Hard" Theory of Peace

What caused the era of violence in Europe before 1945, and why has the postwar
era, the period of the Cold War, been so much more peaceful? The two world wars
before 1945 had myriad particular and unrepeatable causes, but to the student
of international relations seeking to establish generalizations about the
behavior of states in the past which might illuminate their behavior in the
future, two fundamental causes stand out. These are the multipolar distribution
of power in Europe, and the imbalances of strength that often developed among
the great powers as they jostled for supremacy or advantage.

There is something elementary about the geometry of power in international
relations, and so its importance is easy to overlook. "Bipolarity" and
"multipolarity" are ungainly but necessary coinages. The Cold War, with two
superpowers serving to anchor rival alliances of clearly inferior powers, is
our model of bipolarity. Europe in 1914, with France, Germany, Great Britain,
Austria-Hungary, and Russia positioned as great powers, is our model of
multipolarity.

If the example of 1914 is convincing enough evidence that multipolar systems
are the more dangerous geometry of power, then perhaps I should rest my case.
Alas for theoretical elegance, there are no empirical studies providing
conclusive support for this proposition. From its beginnings until 1945 the
European state system was multipolar, so this history is barren of comparisons
that would reveal the differing effects of the two systems. Earlier history, to
be sure, does furnish scattered examples of bipolar systems, including
some--Athens and Sparta, Rome and Carthage--that were warlike. But this history
is inconclusive, because it is incomplete. Lacking a comprehensive survey of
history, we can't do much more than offer examples--now on this, now on that
side of the debate. As a result, the case made here rests chiefly on
deduction.

Deductively, a bipolar system is more peaceful for the simple reason that under
it only two major powers are in contention. Moreover those great powers
generally demand allegiance from minor powers in the system, which is likely to
produce rigid alliance structures. The smaller states are then secure from each
other as well as from attack by the rival great power. Consequently (to make a
Dick-and-Jane point with a well-worn social-science term), a bipolar system has
only one dyad across which war might break out. A multipolar system is much
more fluid and has many such dyads. Therefore, other things being equal, war is
statistically more likely in a multipolar system than it is in a bipolar one.
Admittedly, wars in a multipolar world that involve only minor powers or only
one major power are not likely to be as devastating as a conflict between two
major powers. But small wars always have the potential to widen into big
wars.

Also, deterrence is difficult to maintain in a multipolar state system, because
power imbalances are commonplace, and when power asymmetries develop, the
strong become hard to deter. Two great powers can join together to attack a
third state, as Germany and the Soviet Union did in 1939, when they ganged up
on Poland. Furthermore, a major power might simply bully a weaker power in a
one-on-one encounter, using its superior strength to coerce or defeat the minor
state. Germany's actions against Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s provide a
good example of this sort of behavior. Ganging up and bullying are largely
unknown in a bipolar system, since with only two great powers dominating center
stage, it is impossible to produce the power asymmetries that result in ganging
up and bullying.

There is a second reason that deterrence is more problematic under
multipolarity. The resolve of opposing states and also the size and strength of
opposing coalitions are hard to calculate in this geometry of power, because
the shape of the international order tends to remain in flux, owing to the
tendency of coalitions to gain and lose partners. This can lead aggressors to
conclude falsely that they can coerce others by bluffing war, or even achieve
outright victory on the battlefield. For example, Germany was not certain
before 1914 that Britain would oppose it if it reached for Continental
hegemony, and Germany completely failed to foresee that the United States would
eventually move to contain it. In 1939 Germany hoped that France and Britain
would stand aside as it conquered Poland, and again failed to foresee the
eventual American entry into the war. As a result, Germany exaggerated its
prospects for success, which undermined deterrence by encouraging German
adventurism.

The prospects for peace, however, are not simply a function of the number of
great powers in the system. They are also affected by the relative military
strength of those major states. Bipolar and multipolar systems both are likely
to be more peaceful when power is distributed equally in them. Power
inequalities invite war, because they increase an aggressor's prospects for
victory on the battlefield. Most of the general wars that have tormented Europe
over the past five centuries have involved one particularly powerful state
against the other major powers in the system. This pattern characterized the
wars that grew from the attempts at hegemony by Charles V, Philip II, Louis
XIV, Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany, and Nazi Germany.
Hence the size of the gap in military power between the two leading states in
the system is a key determinant of stability. Small gaps foster peace; larger
gaps promote war.

Nuclear weapons seem to be in almost everybody's bad book, but the fact is that
they are a powerful force for peace. Deterrence is most likely to hold when the
costs and risks of going to war are unambiguously stark. The more horrible the
prospect of war, the less likely war is. Deterrence is also more robust when
conquest is more difficult. Potential aggressor states are given pause by the
patent futility of attempts at expansion.

Nuclear weapons favor peace on both counts. They are weapons of mass
destruction, and would produce horrendous devastation if used in any numbers.
Moreover, they are more useful for self-defense than for aggression. If both
sides' nuclear arsenals are secure from attack, creating an arrangement of
mutual assured destruction, neither side can employ these weapons to gain a
meaningful military advantage. International conflicts then become tests of
pure will. Who would dare to use these weapons of unimaginable destructive
power? Defenders have the advantage here, because defenders usually value their
freedom more than aggressors value new conquests.

Nuclear weapons further bolster peace by moving power relations among states
toward equality. States that possess nuclear deterrents can stand up to one
another, even if their nuclear arsenals vary greatly in size, as long as both
sides have an assured destruction capability. In addition, mutual assured
destruction helps alleviate the vexed problem of miscalculation by leaving
little doubt about the relative power of states.

No discussion of the causes of peace in the twentieth century would be complete
without a word on nationalism. With "nationalism" as a synonym for "love of
country" I have no quarrel. But hypernationalism, the belief that other nations
or nation-states are both inferior and threatening, is perhaps the single
greatest domestic threat to peace, although it is still not a leading force in
world politics. Hypernationalism arose in the past among European states
because most of them were nation-states--states composed mainly of people from
a single ethnic group--that existed in an anarchic world, under constant threat
from other states. In such a system people who love their own nation can easily
come to be contemptuous of the nationalities inhabiting opposing states. The
problem is worsened when domestic elites demonize a rival nation to drum up
support for national-security policy.

Hypernationalism finds its most fertile soil under military systems relying on
mass armies. These require sacrifices to sustain, and the state is tempted to
appeal to nationalist sentiments to mobilize its citizens to make them. The
quickening of hypernationalism is least likely when states can rely on small
professional armies, or on complex high-technology military organizations that
operate without vast manpower. For this reason, nuclear weapons work to dampen
nationalism, because they shift the basis of military power away from mass
armies and toward smaller, high-technology organizations.

Hypernationalism declined sharply in Europe after 1945, not only because of the
nuclear revolution but also because the postwar occupation forces kept it down.
Moreover, the European states, no longer providing their own security, lacked
an incentive to whip up nationalism to bolster public support for national
defense. But the decisive change came in the shift of the prime locus of
European politics to the United States and the Soviet Union--two states made up
of peoples of many different ethnic origins which had not exhibited nationalism
of the virulent type found in Europe. This welcome absence of hypernationalism
has been further helped by the greater stability of the postwar order. With
less expectation of war, neither superpower felt compelled to mobilize its
citizens for war.

Bipolarity, an equal balance of military power, and nuclear weapons--these,
then, are the key elements of my explanation for the Long Peace.

Many thoughtful people have found the bipolar system in Europe odious and have
sought to end it by dismantling the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and
diminishing Soviet military power. Many have also lamented the military
equality obtaining between the superpowers; some have decried the indecisive
stalemate it produced, recommending instead a search for military superiority;
others have lamented the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars to deter
a war that never happened, proving not that the investment, though expensive,
paid off, but rather that it was wasted. As for nuclear weapons, well, they are
a certifiable Bad Thing. The odium attached to these props of the postwar order
has kept many in the West from recognizing a hard truth: they have kept the
peace.

But so much for the past. What will keep the peace in the future? Specifically,
what new order is likely to emerge if NATO and the Warsaw Pact dissolve, which
they will do if the Cold War is really over, and the Soviets withdraw from
Eastern Europe and the Americans quit Western Europe, taking their nuclear
weapons with them--and should we welcome or fear it?

One dimension of the new European order is certain: it will be multipolar.
Germany, France, Britain, and perhaps Italy will assume major-power status. The
Soviet Union will decline from superpower status, not only because its military
is sure to shrink in size but also because moving forces out of Eastern Europe
will make it more difficult for the Soviets to project power onto the
Continent. They will, of course, remain a major European power. The resulting
four- or five-power system will suffer the problems endemic to multipolar
systems--and will therefore be prone to instability. The other two
dimensions--the distribution of power among the major states and the
distribution of nuclear weapons--are less certain. Indeed, who gets nuclear
weapons is likely to be the most problematic question facing the new Europe.
Three scenarios of the nuclear future in Europe are possible.

The "Europe Without Nuclear Weapons" Scenario

Many Europeans (and some Americans) seek to eliminate nuclear weapons from
Europe altogether. Fashioning this nuclear-free Europe would require that
Britain, France, and the Soviet Union rid themselves of these talismans of
their sovereignty--an improbable eventuality, to say the least. Those who wish
for it nevertheless believe that it would be the most peaceful arrangement
possible. In fact a nuclear-free Europe has the distinction of being the most
dangerous among the envisionable post-Cold War orders. The pacifying effects of
nuclear weapons--the caution they generate, the security they provide, the
rough equality they impose, and the clarity of the relative power they
create--would be lost. Peace would then depend on the other dimensions of the
new order--the number of poles and the distribution of power among them. The
geometry of power in Europe would look much as it did between the world wars--a
design for tension, crisis, and possibly even war.

The Soviet Union and a unified Germany would likely be the most powerful states
in a nuclear-free Europe. A band of small independent states in Eastern Europe
would lie between them. These minor Eastern European powers would be likely to
fear the Soviets as much as the Germans, and thus would probably not be
disposed to cooperate with the Soviets to deter possible German aggression. In
fact, this very problem arose in the 1930s, and the past forty-five years of
Soviet occupation have surely done little to mitigate Eastern European fears of
a Soviet military presence. Thus scenarios in which Germany uses force against
Poland, Czechoslovakia, or even Austria enter the realm of the possible in a
nuclear-free Europe.

Then, too, the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe hardly guarantees a
permanent exit. Indeed, the Russian presence in Eastern Europe has surged and
ebbed repeatedly over the past few centuries. In a grave warning, a member of
President Mikhail Gorbachev's negotiating team at the recent Washington summit
said, "You have the same explosive mixture you had in Germany in the 1930s. The
humiliation of a great power. Economic troubles. The rise of nationalism. You
should not underestimate the danger."

Conflicts between Eastern European states might also threaten the stability of
the new European order. Serious tensions already exist between Hungary and
Romania over Romania's treatment of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, a
formerly Hungarian region that still contains roughly two million ethnic
Hungarians. Absent the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, Romania and Hungary
might have gone to war over this issue by now, and it might bring them to war
in the future. This is not the only potential danger spot in Eastern Europe as
the Soviet empire crumbles. The Polish-German border could be a source of
trouble. Poland and Czechoslovakia have a border dispute. If the Soviets allow
some of their republics to achieve independence, the Poles and the Romanians
may lay claim to territory now in Soviet hands which once belonged to them.
Looking farther south, civil war in Yugoslavia is a distinct possibility.
Yugoslavia and Albania might come to blows over Kosovo, a region of Yugoslavia
harboring a nationalistic Albanian majority. Bulgaria has its own quarrel with
Yugoslavia over Macedonia, while Turkey resents Bulgaria's treatment of its
Turkish minority. The danger that these bitter ethnic and border disputes will
erupt into war in a supposedly Edenic nuclear-free Europe is enough to make one
nostalgic for the Cold War.

Warfare in Eastern Europe would cause great suffering to Eastern Europeans. It
also might widen to include the major powers, especially if disorder created
fluid politics that offered opportunities for expanded influence, or threatened
defeat for states friendly to one or another of the major powers. During the
Cold War both superpowers were drawn into Third World conflicts across the
globe, often in distant areas of little strategic importance. Eastern Europe is
directly adjacent to both the Soviet Union and Germany, and it has considerable
economic and strategic importance. Thus trouble in Eastern Europe would offer
even greater temptations to these powers than past conflicts in the Third World
offered to the superpowers. Furthermore, Eastern European states would have a
strong incentive to drag the major powers into their local conflicts, because
the results of such conflicts would be largely determined by the relative
success of each party in finding external allies.

It is difficult to predict the precise balance of conventional military power
that will emerge in post-Cold War Europe. The Soviet Union might recover its
strength soon after withdrawing from Eastern Europe. In that case Soviet power
would outmatch German power. But centrifugal national forces might pull the
Soviet Union apart, leaving no remnant state that is the equal of a unified
Germany. Finally, and probably most likely, Germany and the Soviet Union might
emerge as powers of roughly equal strength. The first two geometries of power,
with their marked military inequality between the two leading countries, would
be especially worrisome, although there would be cause for concern even if
Soviet and German power were balanced.

A non-nuclear Europe, to round out this catalogue of dangers, would likely be
especially disturbed by hypernationalism, since security in such an order would
rest on mass armies, which, as we have seen, often cannot be maintained without
a mobilized public. The problem would probably be most acute in Eastern Europe,
with its uncertain borders and irredentist minority groups. But there is also
potential for trouble in Germany. The Germans have generally done an admirable
job of combating hypernationalism over the past forty-five years, and of
confronting the dark side of their past. Nevertheless, a portent like the
recent call of some prominent Germans for a return to greater nationalism in
historical education is disquieting.

For all these reasons, it is perhaps just as well that a nuclear-free Europe,
much as it may be longed for by so many Europeans, does not appear to be in the
cards.

The "Current Ownership" Scenario

Under this scenario Britain, France, and the Soviet Union retain their nuclear
weapons, but no new nuclear powers emerge in Europe. This vision of a
nuclear-free zone in Central Europe with nuclear weapons remaining on the
flanks of the Continent, is also popular in Europe, but it, too, has doubtful
prospects.

Germany will prevent it over the long run. The Germans are not likely to be
willing to rely on the Poles or the Czechs to provide their forward defense
against a possible direct Soviet conventional attack on their homeland. Nor are
the Germans likely to trust the Soviet Union to refrain for all time from
nuclear blackmail against a non-nuclear Germany. Hence they will eventually
look to nuclear weapons as the surest means of security, just as NATO has
done.

The small states of Eastern Europe will also have strong incentives to acquire
nuclear weapons. Without them they would be open to nuclear blackmail by the
Soviet Union, or by Germany if proliferation stopped them. Even if those major
powers did not have nuclear arsenals, no Eastern European state could match
German or Soviet conventional strength.

Clearly, then, a scenario in which current ownership continues, without
proliferation, seems very unlikely.

The "Nuclear Proliferation" Scenario

The most probable scenario in the wake of the Cold War is further nuclear
proliferation in Europe. This outcome is laden with dangers, but it also might
just provide the best hope for maintaining stability on the Continent.
Everything depends on how proliferation is managed. Mismanaged proliferation
could produce disaster; well-managed proliferation could produce an order
nearly as stable as that of the Long Peace.

The dangers that could arise from mismanaged proliferation are both profound
and numerous. There is the danger that the proliferation process itself could
give one of the existing nuclear powers a strong incentive to stop a
non-nuclear neighbor from joining the club, much as Israel used force to stop
Iraq from acquiring a nuclear capability. There is the danger that an unstable
nuclear competition would emerge among the new nuclear states. They might lack
the resources to make their nuclear forces invulnerable, which could create
first-strike fears and incentives--a recipe for disaster in a crisis. Finally,
there is the danger that by increasing the number of fingers on the nuclear
trigger, proliferation would increase the risk that nuclear weapons would be
fired by accident or captured by terrorists or used by madmen.

These and other dangers of proliferation can be lessened if the current nuclear
powers take the right steps. To forestall preventive attacks, they can extend
security guarantees. To help the new nuclear powers secure their deterrents,
they can provide technical assistance. And they can help to socialize nascent
nuclear societies to understand the lethal character of the forces they are
acquiring. This kind of well-managed proliferation could help bolster peace.

Proliferation should ideally stop with Germany. It has a large economic base,
and so could afford to sustain a secure nuclear force. Moreover, Germany would
no doubt feel insecure without nuclear weapons, and if it felt insecure its
impressive conventional strength would give it a significant capacity to
disturb the tranquillity of Europe. But if the broader spread of nuclear
weapons proves impossible to prevent without taking extreme steps, the current
nuclear powers should let proliferation occur in Eastern Europe while doing all
they can to channel it in safe directions.

However, I am pessimistic that proliferation can be well managed. The members
of the nuclear club are likely to resist proliferation, but they cannot easily
manage this tricky process while at the same time resisting it--and they will
have several motives to resist. The established nuclear powers will be
exceedingly chary of helping the new nuclear powers build secure deterrents,
simply because it goes against the grain of state behavior to share military
secrets with other states. After all, knowledge of sensitive military
technology could be turned against the donor state if that technology were
passed on to adversaries. Furthermore, proliferation in Europe will undermine
the legitimacy of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and this could
open the floodgates of proliferation worldwide. The current nuclear powers will
not want that to happen, and so they will probably spend their energy trying to
thwart proliferation, rather than seeking to manage it.

The best time for proliferation to occur would be during a period of relative
international calm. Proliferation in the midst of a crisis would obviously be
dangerous, since states in conflict with an emerging nuclear power would then
have a powerful incentive to interrupt the process by force. However, the
opposition to proliferation by citizens of the potential nuclear powers would
be so vociferous, and the external resistance from the nuclear club would be so
great, that it might take a crisis to make those powers willing to pay the
domestic and international costs of building a nuclear force. All of which
means that proliferation is likely to occur under international conditions that
virtually ensure it will be mismanaged.

Is War Obsolete?

Many students of European politics will reject my pessimistic analysis of
post-Cold War Europe. They will say that a multipolar Europe, with or without
nuclear weapons, will be no less peaceful than the present order. Three
specific scenarios for a peaceful future have been advanced, each of which
rests on a well-known theory of international relations. However, each of these
"soft" theories of peace is flawed.

Under the first optimistic scenario, a non-nuclear Europe would remain peaceful
because Europeans recognize that even a conventional war would be horrific.
Sobered by history, national leaders will take care to avoid war. This scenario
rests on the "obsolescence of war" theory, which posits that modern
conventional war had become so deadly by 1945 as to be unthinkable as an
instrument of statecraft. War is yesterday's nightmare.

The fact that the Second World War occurred casts doubt on this theory: if any
war could have persuaded Europeans to forswear conventional war, it should have
been the First World War, with its vast casualties. The key flaw in this theory
is the assumption that all conventional wars will be long and bloody wars of
attrition. Proponents ignore the evidence of several wars since 1945, as well
as several campaign-ending battles of the Second World War, that it is still
possible to gain a quick and decisive victory on the conventional battlefield
and avoid the devastation of a protracted conflict. Conventional wars can be
won rather cheaply; nuclear war cannot be, because neither side can escape
devastation by the other, regardless of what happens on the battlefield. Thus
the incentives to avoid war are of another order of intensity in a nuclear
world than they are in a conventional world.

There are several other flaws in this scenario. There is no systematic evidence
demonstrating that Europeans believe war is obsolete. The Romanians and the
Hungarians don't seem to have gotten the message. However, even if it were
widely believed in Europe that war is no longer thinkable, attitudes could
change. Public opinion on national-security issues is notoriously fickle and
responsive to manipulation by elites as well as to changes in the international
environment. An end to the Cold War, as we have seen, will be accompanied by a
sea change in the geometry of power in Europe, which will surely alter European
thinking about questions of war and peace. Is it not possible, for example,
that German thinking about the benefits of controlling Eastern Europe will
change markedly once American forces are withdrawn from Central Europe and the
Germans are left to provide for their own security? Is it not possible that
they would countenance a conventional war against a substantially weaker
Eastern European state to enhance their position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union?
Finally, only one country need decide that war is thinkable to make war
possible.

Is Prosperity the Path to Peace?

Proponents of the second optimistic scenario base their optimism about the
future of Europe on the unified European market coming in 1992--the realization
of the dream of the European Community. A strong EC, they argue, ensures that
the European economy will remain open and prosperous, which will keep the
European states cooperating with one another. Prosperity will make for peace.
The threat of an aggressive Germany will be removed by enclosing the newly
unified German state in the benign embrace of the EC. Even Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union can eventually be brought into the EC. Peace and prosperity
will then extend their sway from the Atlantic to the Urals.

This scenario is based on the theory of economic liberalism, which assumes that
states are primarily motivated by the desire to achieve prosperity and that
leaders place the material welfare of their publics above all other
considerations, including security. Stability flows not from military power but
from the creation of a liberal economic order.

A liberal economic order works in several ways to enhance peace and dampen
conflict. In the first place, it requires significant political cooperation to
make the trading system work--make states richer. The more prosperous states
grow, the greater their incentive for further political cooperation. A
benevolent spiral relationship sets in between political cooperation and
prosperity. Second, a liberal economic order fosters economic interdependence,
a situation in which states are mutually vulnerable in the economic realm. When
interdependence is high, the theory holds, there is less temptation to cheat or
behave aggressively toward other states, because all states can retaliate
economically. Finally, some theorists argue, an international institution like
the EC will, with ever-increasing political cooperation, become so powerful
that it will take on a life of its own, eventually evolving into a superstate.
In short, Mrs. Thatcher's presentiments about the EC are absolutely right.

This theory has one grave flaw: the main assumption underpinning it is wrong.
States are not primarily motivated by the desire to achieve prosperity.
Although economic calculations are hardly trivial to them, states operate in
both an international political and an international economic environment, and
the former dominates the latter when the two systems come into conflict.
Survival in an anarchic international political system is the highest goal a
state can have.

Proponents of economic liberalism largely ignore the effects of anarchy on
state behavior and concentrate instead on economic motives. When this omission
is corrected, however, their arguments collapse for two reasons.

Competition for security makes it difficult for states to cooperate, which,
according to the theory of economic liberalism, they must do. When security is
scarce, states become more concerned about relative than about absolute gains.
They ask of an exchange not "Will both of us gain?" but "Who will gain more?"
They reject even cooperation that will yield an absolute economic gain if the
other state will gain more, from fear that the other might convert its gain to
military strength, and then use this strength to win by coercion in later
rounds. Cooperation is much easier to achieve if states worry only about
absolute gains. The goal, then, is simply to ensure that the overall economic
pie is expanding and that each state is getting at least some part of the
increase. However, anarchy guarantees that security will often be scarce; this
heightens states' concerns about relative gains, which makes cooperation
difficult unless the pie can be finely sliced to reflect, and thus not disturb,
the current balance of power.

Interdependence, moreover, is as likely to lead to conflict as to cooperation,
because states will struggle to escape the vulnerability that interdependence
creates, in order to bolster their national security. In time of crisis or war,
states that depend on others for critical economic supplies will fear cutoff or
blackmail; they may well respond by trying to seize the source of supply by
force of arms. There are numerous historical examples of states' pursuing
aggressive military policies for the purpose of achieving economic autarky. One
thinks of both Japan and Germany during the interwar period. And one recalls
that during the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s there was much talk in
America about using military force to seize Arab oil fields.

In twentieth-century Europe two periods saw liberal economic order with high
levels of interdependence. According to the theory of economic liberalism,
stability should have obtained during those periods. It did not.

The first case clearly contradicts the economic liberals. The years from 1890
to 1914 were probably the time of greatest economic interdependence in Europe's
history. Yet those years of prosperity were all the time making hideously for
the First World War.

The second case covers the Cold War years, during which there has been much
interdependence among the EC states, and relations among them have been very
peaceful. This case, not surprisingly, is the centerpiece of the economic
liberals' argument.

We certainly see a correlation in this period between interdependence and
stability but that does not-mean that interdependence has caused cooperation
among the Western democracies. More likely the Cold War was the prime cause of
cooperation among the Western democracies, and the main reason that intra-EC
relations have flourished.

A powerful and potentially dangerous Soviet Union forced the Western
democracies to band together to meet a common threat. This threat muted
concerns about relative gains arising from economic cooperation among the EC
states by giving each Western democracy a vested interest in seeing its
alliance partners grow powerful. Each increment of power helped deter the
Soviets. Moreover, they all had a powerful incentive to avoid conflict with one
another while the Soviet Union loomed to the East, ready to harvest the grain
of Western quarrels.

In addition, America's hegemonic position in NATO, the military counterpart to
the EC, mitigated the effects of anarchy on the Western democracies and induced
cooperation among them. America not only provided protection against the Soviet
threat; it also guaranteed that no EC state would aggress against another. For
example, France did not have to fear Germany as it re-armed, because the
American presence in Germany meant that the Germans were contained. With the
United States serving as a night watchman, fears about relative gains among the
Western European states were mitigated, and furthermore, those states were
willing to allow their economies to become tightly interdependent.

Take away the present Soviet threat to Western Europe, send the American forces
home, and relations among the EC states will be fundamentally altered. Without
a common Soviet threat or an American night watchman, Western European states
will do what they did for centuries before the onset of the Cold War--look upon
one another with abiding suspicion. Consequently, they will worry about
imbalances in gains and about the loss of autonomy that results from
cooperation. Cooperation in this new order will be more difficult than it was
during the Cold War. Conflict will be more likely.

In sum, there are good reasons for being skeptical about the claim that a more
powerful EC can provide the basis for peace in a multipolar Europe.

Do Democracies Really Love Peace?

Under the third scenario war is avoided because many European states have
become democratic since the early twentieth century, and liberal democracies
simply do not fight one another. At a minimum, the presence of liberal
democracies in Western Europe renders that half of Europe free from armed
conflict. At a maximum, democracy spreads to Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union, bolstering peace. The idea that peace is cognate with democracy is a
vision of international relations shared by both liberals and
neoconservatives.

This scenario rests on the "peace-loving democracies" theory. Two arguments are
made for it.

First, some claim that authoritarian leaders are more likely to go to war than
leaders of democracies, because authoritarian leaders are not accountable to
their publics, which carry the main burdens of war. In a democracy the
citizenry which pays the price of war, has a greater say in what the government
does. The people, so the argument goes, are more hesitant to start trouble,
because it is they who must pay the bloody price; hence the greater their
power, the fewer wars.

The second argument rests on the claim that the citizens of liberal democracies
respect popular democratic rights--those of their countrymen, and those of
people in other states. They view democratic governments as more legitimate
than others, and so are loath to impose a foreign regime on a democratic state
by force. Thus an inhibition on war missing from other international
relationships is introduced when two democracies face each other.

The first of these arguments is flawed because it is not possible to sustain
the claim that the people in a democracy are especially sensitive to the costs
of war and therefore less willing than authoritarian leaders to fight wars. In
fact the historical record shows that democracies are every bit as likely to
fight wars as are authoritarian states, though admittedly, thus far, not with
other democracies.

Furthermore, mass publics, whether in a democracy or not, can become deeply
imbued with nationalistic or religious fervor, making them prone to support
aggression and quite indifferent to costs. The widespread public support in
post-Revolutionary France for Napoleon's wars is just one example of this
phenomenon. At the same time, authoritarian leaders are often fearful of going
to war, because war tends to unleash democratic forces that can undermine the
regime. In short, war can impose high costs on authoritarian leaders as well as
on their citizenry.

The second argument, which emphasizes the transnational respect for democratic
rights among democracies, rests on a secondary factor that is generally
overridden by other factors such as nationalism and religious fundamentalism.
Moreover, there is another problem with the argument. The possibility always
exists that a democracy, especially the kind of fledgling democracy emerging in
Eastern Europe, will revert to an authoritarian state. This threat of
backsliding means that one democratic state can never be sure that another
democratic state will not turn on it sometime in the future. Liberal
democracies must therefore worry about relative power among themselves, which
is tantamount to saying that each has an incentive to consider aggression
against another to forestall trouble. Lamentably, it is not possible for even
liberal democracies to transcend anarchy.

Problems with the deductive logic aside, at first glance the historical record
seems to offer strong support for the theory of peace-loving democracies. It
appears that no liberal democracies have ever fought against each other.
Evidentiary problems, however, leave the issue in doubt.

First, democracies have been few in number over the past two centuries, and
thus there have not been many cases in which two democracies were in a position
to fight with each other. Three prominent cases are usually cited: Britain and
the United States (1832 to the present); Britain and France (1832-1849;
1871-1940); and the Western democracies since 1945.

Second, there are other persuasive explanations for why war did not occur in
those three cases, and these competing explanations must be ruled out before
the theory of peace-loving democracies can be accepted. Whereas relations
between the British and the Americans during the nineteenth century were hardly
blissful, in the twentieth century they have been quite harmonious, and thus
fit closely with the theory's expectations. That harmony, however, can easily
be explained by common threats that forced Britain and the United States to
work together--a serious German threat in the first part of the century, and
later a Soviet threat. The same basic argument applies to relations between
France and Britain. Although they were not on the best of terms during most of
the nineteenth century their relations improved significantly around the turn
of the century with the rise of Germany. Finally, as noted above, the Soviet
threat goes far in explaining the absence of war among the Western democracies
since 1945.

Third, several democracies have come close to fighting each other, suggesting
that the absence of war may be due simply to chance. France and Britain
approached war during the Fashoda crisis of 1898. France and Weimar Germany
might have come to blows over the Rhineland during the 1920s. The United States
has clashed with a number of elected governments in the Third World during the
Cold War, including the Allende regime in Chile and the Arbenz regime in
Guatemala.

Last, some would classify Wilhelmine Germany as a democracy, or at least a
quasi-democracy; if so, the First World War becomes a war among democracies.

While the spread of democracy across Europe has great potential benefits for
human rights, it will not guarantee peaceful relations among the states of
post-Cold War Europe. Most Americans will find this argument counterintuitive.
They see the United States as fundamentally peace-loving, and they ascribe this
peacefulness to its democratic character. From this they generalize that
democracies are more peaceful than authoritarian states, which leads them to
conclude that the complete democratization of Europe would largely eliminate
the threat of war. This view of international politics is likely to be
repudiated by the events of coming years.

Missing the Cold War

The implications of my analysis are straightforward, if paradoxical.
Developments that threaten to end the Cold War are dangerous. The West has an
interest in maintaining peace in Europe. It therefore has an interest in
maintaining the Cold War order, and hence has an interest in continuing the
Cold War confrontation. The Cold War antagonism could be continued at lower
levels of East-West tension than have prevailed in the past, but a complete end
to the Cold War would create more problems than it would solve.

The fate of the Cold War is mainly in the hands of the Soviet Union. The Soviet
Union is the only superpower that can seriously threaten to overrun Europe, and
the Soviet threat provides the glue that holds NATO together. Take away that
offensive threat and the United States is likely to abandon the Continent; the
defensive alliance it has headed for forty years may well then disintegrate,
bringing an end to the bipolar order that has kept the peace of Europe for the
past forty-five years.

There is little the Americans or the West Europeans can do to perpetuate the
Cold War.

For one thing, domestic politics preclude it. Western leaders obviously cannot
base national-security policy on the need to maintain forces in Central Europe
simply to keep the Soviets there. The idea of deploying large numbers of troops
in order to bait the Soviets into an order-keeping competition would be
dismissed as bizarre, and contrary to the general belief that ending the Cold
War and removing the Soviet yoke from Eastern Europe would make the world safer
and better.

For another, the idea of propping up a declining rival runs counter to the
basic behavior of states. States are principally concerned about their relative
power in the system--hence they look for opportunities to take advantage of one
another. If anything, they prefer to see adversaries decline, and invariably do
whatever they can to speed up the process and maximize the distance of the
fall. States, in other words, do not ask which distribution of power best
facilitates stability and then do everything possible to build or maintain such
an order. Instead, each pursues the narrower aim of maximizing its power
advantage over potential adversaries. The particular international order that
results is simply a by-product of that competition.

Consider, for example, the origins of the Cold War order in Europe. No state
intended to create it. In fact the United States and the Soviet Union each
worked hard in the early years of the Cold War to undermine the other's
position in Europe, which would have ended the bipolar order on the Continent.
The remarkably stable system that emerged in Europe in the late 1940s was the
unintended consequence of an intense competition between the superpowers.

Moreover, even if the Americans and the West Europeans wanted to help the
Soviets maintain their status as a superpower, it is not apparent that they
could do so. The Soviet Union is leaving Eastern Europe and cutting its
military forces largely because its economy is floundering badly. The Soviets
don't know how to fix their economy themselves, and there is little that
Western governments can do to help them. The West can and should avoid doing
malicious mischief to the Soviet economy, but at this juncture it is difficult
to see how the West can have a significant positive influence.

The fact that the West cannot sustain the Cold War does not mean that the
United States should make no attempt to preserve the current order. It should
do what it can to avert a complete mutual withdrawal from Europe. For instance,
the American negotiating position at the conventional-arms-control talks should
aim toward large mutual force reductions but should not contemplate complete
mutual withdrawal. The Soviets may opt to withdraw all their forces
unilaterally anyway; if so, there is little the United States can do to stop
them.

Should complete Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe prove unavoidable, the
West would confront the question of how to maintain peace in a multipolar
Europe. Three policy prescriptions are in order.

First, the United States should encourage the limited and carefully managed
proliferation of nuclear weapons in Europe. The best hope for avoiding war in
post-Cold War Europe is nuclear deterrence; hence some nuclear proliferation is
necessary, to compensate for the withdrawal of the Soviet and American nuclear
arsenals from Central Europe. Ideally, as I have argued, nuclear weapons would
spread to Germany but to no other state.

Second, Britain and the United States, as well as the Continental states, will
have to counter any emerging aggressor actively and efficiently, in order to
offset the ganging up and bullying that are sure to arise in post-Cold War
Europe. Balancing in a multipolar system, however, is usually a problem-ridden
enterprise, because of either geography or the problems of coordination.
Britain and the United States, physically separated from the Continent, may
conclude that they have little interest in what happens there. That would be
abandoning their responsibilities and, more important, their interests. Both
states failed to counter Germany before the two world wars, making war more
likely. It is essential for peace in Europe that they not repeat their past
mistakes.

Both states must maintain military forces that can be deployed against
Continental states that threaten to start a war. To do this they must persuade
their citizens to support a policy of continued Continental commitment. This
will be more difficult than it once was, because its principal purpose will be
to preserve peace, rather than to prevent an imminent hegemony, and the
prevention of hegemony is a simpler goal to explain publicly. Furthermore, this
prescription asks both countries to take on an unaccustomed task, given that it
is the basic nature of states to focus on maximizing relative power, not on
bolstering stability. Nevertheless, the British and the Americans have a real
stake in peace, especially since there is the risk that a European war might
involve the large-scale use of nuclear weapons. Therefore, it should be
possible for their governments to lead their publics to recognize this interest
and support policies that protect it.

The Soviet Union may eventually return to its past expansionism and threaten to
upset the status quo. If so, we are back to the Cold War. However, if the
Soviets adhere to status-quo policies, Soviet power could play a key role in
countering Germany and in maintaining order in Eastern Europe. It is important
in those cases where the Soviets are acting in a balancing capacity that the
United States cooperate with its former adversary and not let residual distrust
from the Cold War obtrude.

Third, a concerted effort should be made to keep hypernationalism at bay,
especially in Eastern Europe. Nationalism has been contained during the Cold
War, but it is likely to reemerge once Soviet and American forces leave the
heart of Europe. It will be a force for trouble unless curbed. The teaching of
honest national history is especially important, since the teaching of false,
chauvinist history is the main vehicle for spreading hypernationalism. States
that teach a dishonestly self-exculpating or self-glorifying history should be
publicly criticized and sanctioned.

None of these tasks will be easy. In fact, I expect that the bulk of my
prescriptions will not be followed; most run contrary to important strains of
domestic American and European opinion, and to the basic nature of state
behavior. And even if they are followed, peace in Europe will not be
guaranteed. If the Cold War is truly behind us, therefore, the stability of the
past forty-five years is not likely to be seen again in the coming decades.